Documentary gallops into Year of the Horse

When accomplished producer Sun Shuyun sat down to her family's Spring Festival feast in 2018, she decided to do more than just enjoy the traditional dishes. Curious about the deeper significance of the Chinese zodiac, she turned to her relatives with a simple question: "What does your animal sign truly mean?"

The answers, however, left her underwhelmed. "Most of them just said, 'It symbolizes good fortune and happiness'," she recalls with a hint of disappointment.

Haunted by the desire to uncover more about zodiac animals, a legacy of the millennia-old festival, Sun spent the next five years searching for answers.

After traveling to four continents and capturing the stories of six different horse breeds through seven heartwarming stand-alone tales, the first footage from the documentary Horse Power was screened at the 15th Beijing International Film Festival on April 21.

As one of the world's first zodiac animal documentary films, it is set to premiere on the first day of 2026, the Year of the Horse. It will be released in three formats: an 85-minute version for television and streaming platforms, a 40-minute cut for giant-screen and dome theaters, and a 15-minute edition specifically for children.

"For millennia, horses have been our most important friends and companions. They have even changed the course of history," says Sun.

In selecting breeds, the documentary follows three key criteria: geographic diversity, rarity and uniqueness, and the symbolic traits associated with the horse in the Chinese zodiac.

Director Mark Brownlow, who is known for the BBC nature documentaries Frozen Planet II and Blue Planet II, says via video that he was initially skeptical when invited to direct Horse Power two years ago.

"I'm used to blowing audiences away with groundbreaking stories and rarely seen animals, whether in the depths of our oceans or the frozen wilderness of Antarctica. So how could a film about a domestic animal possibly compete?" he says.

"But since we started filming Horse Power, I knew we were onto something special. Horses are often seen as the epitome of human dreams. By applying specialist wildlife film techniques — from drones to onboard cameras to ultra-high-speed cameras — we were able to capture their raw power, strength, breathtaking speed, and endurance," he adds.

Describing the science behind their hidden abilities as "mind-blowing", Brownlow continues: "The discovery that horses can read our emotional state from our expressions, their innate intuition, and their capacity to sync their heart rates with ours — it's extraordinary. But at its core, this is a human story."

One of the documentary's most captivating stories follows an 8-year-old girl being trained by her father, as she prepares to compete in an 18-kilometer endurance race with her Mongolian horse on the grasslands of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

"The endurance of Mongolian horses is well known around the world. Genghis Khan's warriors rode them all the way from Asia to Europe," says Sun.

Other stories range from a gentle horse comforting patients in the United Kingdom to two wild stallions battling for mating rights in the untamed wilderness of North America.

Sun says that the documentary also highlights the story of Przewalski's horses — also known as Mongolian or Asian wild horses — once extinct in the wild and still among the world's rarest equine species.

China launched a breeding program in 1985 to bring Przewalski's horses back to their ancestral homeland, using 24 horses imported from Europe and the United States to repopulate the subspecies. Their population has since grown to about 700, with an estimated global population of 2,000.

"As the only true wild horse and the most endangered horse in the world, Przewalski's horses deserve to be back in the wild, and China has played a significant role in rewilding them", says Sun, adding that she feels it's a story that needs to be told to the world in the Year of the Horse.

Also mentioning that many wildlife documentaries broadcast on Chinese TV channels or streamed online over the past 30 years have been imported, Sun says their decision to produce Horse Power was driven by a desire to infuse the film with distinctively Chinese perspectives and values.

The documentary is scheduled for global release on Jan 1, 2026.